Perhaps I do not speak for all, but I assume the idea of death has wandered through nearly everyone’s thoughts at some point in their life; how they die, where, at what age, what cause, who they have around them. I do not think the same could be said in terms of a crippling injury and lifelong disability such as in the case of Chuck, losing all motor function below the neck, never to live entirely independently again. Whether it is too dire a situation to allow to roam through our conscious, or because of the natural assumption that our lives will continue entirely on our own accord, the truth is that such a thing could happen to anyone entirely unexpected, throwing life into a direction completely foreign to what we imagined it to be. Chuck’s anger over time is understandable, especially concerning the doctor who skipped beyond how he would be able to smoke straight to how to control how much he would smoke. When placed in such a situation, the idea of common sense changes from that of an able-bodied person, and when it includes being dependent on even the simplest of tasks, the difference in this “common sense,” and a “slip of the tongue,” would certainly be frustrating, and hurtful to one’s pride. Worse, I feel, is it to come from someone you consider close. As Chuck says, in order to maintain relations, it’s hard to speak out against his friends ways of “helping” him. But the simple fact is that all personal relations will be unavoidably affected by this event, which could have entirely been out of your hands in the first place.
Although Jim differs in that he had Cerebral Palsy since birth, I imagine that, while he generally has less frustration towards life like Chuck, he has a lingering sense of defeat- slowly built up throughout his childhood in which he achieved things far later and with far greater effort than a normal person. This may have helped in building up a stronger resistance to his situation, since he has never known life without it, but with his first question to Brian as to whether people always greet him in the hallways, it is clear that a sense of doubt, and resentment still resides in him. Although not technically a disability, his story makes me think back to when I was a child.
Jim’s quote, “Society looks at people who are blind or who use crutches and does not consider them to be mentally retarded. But they label people who have speech problems as mentally retarded.” struck me in particular. Although fuzzy in my memory, since I was just starting school (around age 5-7, pre-K to 1st/2nd grade), I had a kind of speech impediment growing up as well. Being born to two Chinese speaking parents in the US, I had a lot of confusion then. Not only did we speak mandarin in the house, but also often Shanghainese, in contrast to the generally English speaking environment around me. My first language is also technically mandarin, my first words certainly being 妈妈 instead of mama. Because of this, I didn’t often talk, in fact I could barely form coherent sentences until I was 6 in either language. When talking about this with my mom years down the line, she expressed exactly what Jim saw, saying that when she was called in to have a meeting with my first grade teacher regarding my constant talking being a distraction to the class, she felt relieved more than anything, and had to force a smile down throughout the meeting with the teacher because, up until then, she too had worried if I might’ve had some sort of mental/learning disability. This is also the reason why I eventually lost the ability to speak Chinese fluently, since my mother made the conscious decision to switch entirely to English when talking with me, to lessen the confusion, but even this had some small drawbacks as she was taught through a British program. I even recall that years later, in the 5th grade, some friends started picking on me for pronouncing “two” closer to “choo”, and spent the entire bus ride home that day trying to correct it for me.